Where was 'god' before 'he' created the universe?

[raw_thought]

Hawking said that asking what happened before creation is like asking,what is north of the north pole?
PS: Hawking is an atheist.

Hawking, as an atheist, was NOT talking about 'divine' creation'. He was referring to the Big Bang and still subscribed to the notion that time was created by the Bang.

It still means nothing to the human mind (including his) as Lee Smolin (leading physicist of the Perimeter Institute) admitted in several of his recent publications.

When I say "creation" I mean the act of creation. I am not implying that something supernatural created the universe. I am only saying that.for Hawking time was created at the big bang. Therefore, you cannot look at anything in spacetime as ythe cause of the universe. It must be in a higher dimension.

[Ned]

Quoting from my recently published book: "Humane Physics":

Philosophical implications - What does it mean?

Most of the books on relativity written for the general public or even for the student, deal with the reasons Einstein proposed this theory, the consequences of accepting the postulates and the experimental proofs of the theory, not the philosophical implication. That’s what I find most exciting.

We will never intuitively understand and accept relativity, because, due to our limitations in speed we lack personal experience of the relativistic world. Yet, we understand it intellectually, mathematically, and we would like somehow to relate to it emotionally. We know that it means something, but we cannot tell what. We can only speculate.

What kind of reality are we talking about when we accept the relative nature of space and time, mass and energy? What happened to the objective reality we assume to exist independently of our minds? The very foundation of science had been, until Einstein, the assumption that there is a world with its objective reality, its unchanging laws. All we had to do is find out how it was put together.

We fancied ourselves as the curious tinkerer who stumbles upon an intriguing machine and, by studying its workings and the visible parts of the mechanism, can understand its function and purpose. We could not approach this task without the assumption that the machine is always the same: what was true yesterday is still true today; what is true for me is also true for everyone else. These were the absolutes we expected from the subject of our investigation.

And then suddenly Einstein comes along and tells us that we were all wrong, there are no absolutes, what appears to one person may look completely different to another: it all depends on how and from where we look at things.

Or did Einstein say that? Did he abolish all the absolutes in our universe? Or did he abolish some, leave some alone and create new ones?

These are important questions and the answer lies in ruthless honesty. We have arrived at a point where we have no choice but to admit our limitations. We can try to cheat by using analogies and evocative images; try to draw a parallel between the reality we have been familiar with in our daily lives and the reality we measure with instruments and describe with mathematics.

In my opinion, such shortcuts are confusing and pointless: reality is what it is and by attaching seductive imagery, we falsify it. On the other hand, if we accept that we have observed facts and logical consequences, without reaching for visual interpretation, then we are on solid ground and ready to follow into the totally obscure world of quantum physics. We must always be aware: what do we know, how do we know it and what are the limits to our knowledge?

[raw_thought]

The idea that nothing happened before the big bang (creation) was not my idea.It was Hawking's idea (and many other physicists. Hawking was not the original author of it. I think that even Carl Sagan said something similar ).
Note that my post said "I will provisionally accept that God created the universe" I did that so as to fit the thread's question. If (IF) God created the universe, he was doing nothing before the big bang because time did not exist before yhe big bang.

[raw_thought]

Space and time are relative. Spacetime is not.
Similarly, imagine a 3 dimensional box. 3 inches by 2 inches by 4 inches. What we call height (lets call the 4 inch side "height") is arbitrary and relative to what we call depth and width. However, the box's size is absolute.

[Ned]

If (IF) God created the universe, he was doing nothing before the big bang because time did not exist before yhe big bang.

...and I have to repeat what I said before: the act of creation assumes a 'before', because to create something means to bring into existence something that did not exist BEFORE!

There is no creation without a BEFORE!!!

We can play with words as much as we want to, but it still means nothing to the human mind.

[Ned]

Space and time are relative. Spacetime is not.
Similarly, imagine a 3 dimensional box. 3 inches by 2 inches by 4 inches. What we call height (lets call the 4 inch side "height") is arbitrary and relative to what we call depth and width. However, the box's size is absolute.

We can play with our imagination till the cows come home, but reality is not subject to our imagination. It is what it is.

Another quote from the same source:

Space-time

An excellent book published in 2003 by Richard Wolfson is Simply Einstein. It has a chapter dealing with the same issues, under the title of: “Is everything relative?”

We have already dealt with two absolutes: the laws of nature and the speed of light, which we expect to be the same for everyone, anywhere. These were the first two absolutes that relativity recognized. But there are more. The next absolute Einstein created for us is space-time. What is it? The name suggests some kind of relationship or interdependence between space and time. Let’s explore what it means.

Newton considered space and time as separate absolutes, with no connection between the two. We measured space in its three dimensions with rulers. We measured time, flowing evenly for everyone, with clocks. This seems obvious in view of everyday experience in the world.

How did it change? What does it mean to us? How is it absolute? The best explanation I have ever read was given by Brian Greene, in his magnificent book: The Fabric of the Cosmos.

“We are used to the fact that objects can move through space, but there is another kind of motion that is equally important: objects also move through time. ……When you look at something like a parked car which from your viewpoint is stationary - not moving through space, that is – all of its motion is through time. …... But if the car speeds away, some of its motion through time is diverted into motion through space.”

Thinking about relativity in this fashion actually makes me feel the four dimensions in which I exist, and I can see how the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time are interwoven to make a complete environment and the notion of time slowing down the faster we go through space actually seems inevitable!

Nobody imagined any other dimensions until String Theory came along.

The four dimensional spacetime means something very specific to our minds. It is part of our reality.

Any further dimensions are baseless speculation, just as the idea of 'god' living there.

[David Handeye]

Of (IF) God created the universe, he was doing nothing before the big bang because time did not exist before yhe big bang.

I don't agree. In the very moment you say "before" you affirm a state of time. Before the BB there is always a before, so time always is.

[raw_thought]

So nothing caused ( no explanation either natural or supernatural ) the universe to exist. It is because it is.
I agree reluctantly!
If the causes go back infinitely that is not an explanation. Metaphorically speaking, imagine that we explain the earth's position in space as that it sits on a turtle.And that turtle sits on a turtle.And that turtle.......That explains nothing. Why are they turtles and not rocks?
On the other hand, if there was an original cause, that cause would have no explanation and so ultimately there is no explanation as to why there is something rather then nothing.
That to me is weirder then yhe strangest Twilight Zone (Rod Serling). That ultimately everything is inexplicable. Note that I am not saying that we are too stupid too know why there is something rather then nothing. I am saying that there is no answer!!!!

[Ned]

I am saying that there is no answer!!!!

Absolutely!

We are a limited biological species and we are not 'gods' who know everything.

We have to accept our limitations as of now, and be content that we are forever broadening our horizons and we learn and experience more and more.

We can take pride in it.

If anyone wants "final answers", then they usually flock to religions.

Religions were invented to be the end-all and be-all of our quest for final answers.

I consider them cowardly intellectual cop-outs.

[Ned]

One last quote on the subject:

How do we live with it?

I am often asked by my students: “What good is something that I can never experience? Isn’t it cruel to show people a world they will never reach? Show them a world that goes way beyond their abilities to live in and, while as in Plato’s cave, they are forever doomed to watch its mere shadows flicker on the walls?”

My answer is, invariably: It is important to understand reality, however strange and alien it appears. We need to know that we are not gods; that our job is not to fight, subdue and defeat nature, but to respect it with the same humility an ordinary leaf would respect the tree it belongs to, if leaves were capable of such emotions.

We may not ever fully live in that world, but we can always sidle up to it, get closer and closer as we see more clearly. Maybe our great-grandchildren, whizzing about near the speed of light in their spaceships will not find time-dilation and length contraction as weird as we do. If you grow up with something, it becomes part of you, you take it for granted.

In the meantime we can, and we do, use these strange laws in calculations when we increase our comfort and security with new technologies. We don’t need to fully comprehend relativity in order to accept it and build it into our lives.

[raw_thought]

To me the demise of the principle of sufficient reason is a mind blower!!! Like I said more eerie then any twilight zone episode.

[Ned]

To me the demise of the principle of sufficient reason......

Let it rest in peace!

[raw_thought]

To me saying that there is no explanation as to why there is something rather then nothing is stranger then any Twilight Zone. However,the logic strongly suggests that.
If I ask,"how did the cat get on the mat"and the answer is that there is no explanation. (Not that we are too stupid to understand the explanation but that there is no explanation) for me is the ultimate mind blowing proposition.

[Ned]

To me saying that there is no explanation as to why there is something rather then nothing is stranger then any Twilight Zone. However,the logic strongly suggests that.
If I ask,"how did the cat get on the mat"and the answer is that there is no explanation. (Not that we are too stupid to understand the explanation but that there is no explanation) for me is the ultimate mind blowing proposition.

Wait till you get into the mind-blowing implications of quantum physics!

How does an electron 'know' if we are watching which slot it is going through?

If we don't watch -- an electron can interact with itself and cause interference pattern.

If we watch -- then it doesn't.

[David Handeye]

So nothing caused ( no explanation either natural or supernatural ) the universe to exist. It is because it is.
I agree reluctantly!
If the causes go back infinitely that is not an explanation. Metaphorically speaking, imagine that we explain the earth's position in space as that it sits on a turtle.And that turtle sits on a turtle.And that turtle.......That explains nothing. Why are they turtles and not rocks?
On the other hand, if there was an original cause, that cause would have no explanation and so ultimately there is no explanation as to why there is something rather then nothing.
That to me is weirder then yhe strangest Twilight Zone (Rod Serling). That ultimately everything is inexplicable. Note that I am not saying that we are too stupid too know why there is something rather then nothing. I am saying that there is no answer!!!!

Well, universe can be eternal. What explanations should we expect? I think even if matter still wasn't, and it was by the big bang, there was a time when matter was not. A time. There is always a time. Hawking is wrong, whatever he could say.